A long walk to freedom

Alice Walker's new book tells the true story of her marriage - an odyssey of love and pain that mirrored America's journey to racial equality. It's a giddy, powerful tale that may well, she says, be her last...

As a young civil-rights activist working in the southern states in the Sixties, Alice Walker met and fell in love with a Jewish civil-rights lawyer, Mel Leventhal. It was, in the truest sense of the words, a forbidden love; at that time, it was illegal for inter-racial couples to wed in Mississippi.

'I came up the steep steps to your air-conditioned offices, wearing my littlest slipping and sliding dress, my slighest sandals, carrying a huge, chocolate, ice- cream cone,' writes Alice Walker in To My Young Husband, the first and most giddily powerful piece in her new book. 'I offered the cone to you after taking a huge lick. You accepted it happily and licked rapturously as if it were the best ice-cream you'd ever had. It was a highly erotic moment, an eroticism heightened by the fact that just by licking the same ice-cream cone a huge portion of the Old South that had kept my soul and my free expression of eroticism chained was forced to fall. That was it, for me.'

That was it, too, for young Leventhal, and this was to herald the love affair which led to a wedding in 1967 and a 'movement' child, herself now with her own self-reflective new book just published. Walker and Leventhal parted in some pain in 1976, she eventually to fame and esteem with The Colour Purple and a successful writing career in California, he to a big law practice on the east coast and a new marriage and family. They have only recently been reconciled.

Now, at 57, she has recalled that early, electric time in her new book, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, a work that, in the way it deals with relations between the races, could hardly be more timely for a nation whose new President attracted only 8 per cent of the black vote and who owes his position, many feel, to the disenfranchisement of the black voter in Florida. The writing of the book, which is dedicated 'to the American race', and its exploration of love and relationships with both sexes marks for its author the end of a cycle which may even mean, she says, that she never writes again.

'It really did seem at times as if our love made us bullet-proof or perhaps invisible,' recalls Walker of the period. 'When we walked down the street together the bullets that were the glances of racist onlookers seemed turned back and sent hurtling off into outer space.' She is writing of a time more than quarter of a century ago, long enough in the past to be taught as history in American schools, but the book concludes with a fear expressed that the country is going backwards and not forwards: 'We are a frightened, broken-hearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory "safety" of skin colour, money and the 1950s.' So what did she mean by that?

Walker has taken her boots off and curled her feet under her on the sofa in her large, comfortable home in Berkeley and is sipping a cup of green tea. There is a painting on the wall of Billie Holiday, looking almost Hawaiian, a stack of logs by the fire. On the table are the books she has been reading, one a history of African-American farmers called Homecoming, and the churango that she is learning. Is it difficult to play? 'Not the way I play it,' she laughs. She wears a 'Free Mumia' badge, a reference to the black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for the killing of a policeman and who has become a cause célèbre among many on the Left who believe he was falsely convicted. Still active politically, she is part of the campaign to free him. She speaks softly.

'I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly,' she says. 'They see the country becoming more and more multi-ethnic and multi-coloured and I think that is quite frightening to them. In the Fifties, everything seemed so great if you were on top but, if you were on the bottom, it was the most horrible of all times.

'I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad,' she says. 'I don't despair. I know that Martin Luther King would have felt very saddened because he gave his life for a very much larger vision but I don't think he would sit and mourn, and he would try to see the positive side of looking at your shadow.'

Walker went to a counter-inauguration protest in San Francisco a few days before George W. Bush was sworn in as the President and finds the prospect of life under his administration depressing. 'Four years of boring repression,' is what she predicts. She voted Green in the last election, mainly because she wanted to support Winona LaDuke, the Greens' Vice-Presidential candidate. 'I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.'

She describes the new book as 'the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce'. She also sees the book's completion as the conclusion of a 30-year writing cycle. 'At the moment, I'm thinking that I may write more or I may not because I may want to do something else with the rest of my life.'

Her ex-husband, 'beloved' as she addresses him in the narrative, has been happy with the book, she says. 'How could he not love it?' she laughs. 'We spent Thanksgiving together after 20 years of not talking and it was very sweet because when the world that we have been building seems to be fading, we need to be reminded what the vision was originally and it was a good vision. He needed to be reminded of who he is also... he's delving more into that idealistic young poet soul that he was when we met.'

By coincidence, their daughter, Rebecca Walker, now 31, referred to in her mother's book as Our Child, has herself just published her own very personal memoir, Black White and Jewish. It explores her parents' relationship and its effect on a child shuttling between a black, initially poor, mother in California and a well-off, white, Jewish father in New York. It is a bittersweet book, dealing with Rebecca's abortion at the age of 14, with drugs and confusion, and with the feelings of loneliness and neglect that came from growing up with a writer for a mother. Often, she would come home from school to find "goodbye notes" informing her that her mother had gone away for a week's solitude.

Both books deal with some of the same topics, such as the Ku Klux Klan's death threats to the young family in Mississippi. Rebecca describes how 'Daddy sits in sometimes with the rifle and the dog waiting for the Klan to come'. Her description of her own graduation day in San Francisco makes clear the tension that existed by then between her parents: 'My parents are careful and each guarded, both of them skating across the surface studiously avoiding waters they might lack the skill to navigate. My father sits in our living-room like a stranger... my mother sits in a rocking chair, shelling pecans and offering uncharacteristically terse replies.'

How did Alice Walker feel about her daughter's book? If it stung her, she won't say so. 'I heard her on the radio yesterday and she was superb. I'm thankful.' The following morning on KPFA, the local radical radio station, Rebecca herself was asked about writing about her mother. She too was guarded, saying only that she feels 'protective' of her.

Alice Walker found it more difficult in this new book to write about real events and real people than about her fictional characters: 'Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly. I just saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and what I liked about it was that people could just take off and go.'

Her name, of course, was made with her fiction, primarily with The Color Purple published in 1982 and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1985 with a cast that included Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. While the book and film brought fame and money and established Walker in the canon of American literature, it also brought criticism, the most wounding of which she dealt with in her book about the film, The Same River Twice.

'Of all the accusations, it was hardest to tolerate the charge that I hated black men,' she wrote. 'From infancy, I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is abundantly clear in my work.'

Such criticism had been painful at first, she said, but she was less affected by it now. 'It's hard to be hurt by people whose views you don't accept, but earlier it did hurt very much. I really did not like being misunderstood. It was painful to me that something that I considered so clearly an expression of love and caring could be taken to be something else. Then I realised that I was dealing with people who were quite cynical and they didn't necessarily believe what they were saying. Once I got that, I didn't suffer so much.'

Sha has also been criticised sometimes for what some critics, mainly on the east coast, saw as a new-age agenda. The Color Purple, for instance, is dedicated 'To the Spirit, without whose assistance neither this book nor I would have been written' and she has never shied away from delving into that area with her writing, whether factual or fictional.

'The east-coast critics are really afraid of the spirit,' she says. 'I don't feel I've had a decent critic ever on the east coast. There's also that feeling that they have the right to suggest what you should be doing. That's absurd.' It was what she saw as the cynicism of the East Coast that led to her settling in California. 'I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.'

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, the eighth child of sharecroppers, and grew up in the state. 'But I felt in Georgia and on the east coast generally very squeezed. People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box or they need to label you and fix you in time and location. I feel a greater fluidity here. People are much more willing to accept that nothing is permanent, everything is changeable so there is freedom and I do need to live where I can be free.'

She shares her home at the moment with a nephew and also has a house in the country, in Mendocino. 'I built it myself. It's a combination of a fourteenth-century Japanese farmhouse and Shinto shrine' and she roars with laughter at her description. 'I'm a pagan Bhuddist who was brought up as a Christian. The pagan part connects me to all of my roots - my African, my Scottish, Irish, Native American, all connected at that pagan root.'

As yet, no one has moved in for the film rights of her own love story but talks are under way with director Deepa Mehta about the filming of By the Light of My Father's Smile and with Pratibha Parmar about filming Possessing the Secret of Joy. She is happy about both ventures.

She has been a ferociously productive writer of books and poetry and articles, so what would she do if she really does stop writing? She gestures at her churango. 'I'm interested in moving into the space I have created for myself. I lived so much time in solitude, writing 23 books, spending a lot of time in the country, just me and my dog. Solitude was the priority. Now it's the opposite. I spend a lot of time with friends. Life has a completely different flavour. I have time for everyone.' She has recently been in the Amazon and is off to Oaxaca in Mexico next month to study Spanish and to explore caves and volcanic peaks in Hawaii in May.

A film crew has arrived on this wet un-Californian morning to interview her about the civil rights heroine, Rosa Parks. So the woman who once received cards through her letterbox in Mississippi telling her that 'the eyes of the Klan are upon you' is now sought for her thoughts and insights by the documentary-makers of California. It has been a long walk.

Alice Walker: The Facts

1944 Born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children. Parents were sharecroppers, descended from slaves.